The NZ Institute of Directors has taken its website offline after it was defaced by a hacker - and it has warned its members to change their passwords in case they were compromised.

Ironically, the Institute - whose members sit on the boards of some of New Zealand's largest companies - has put a lot of energy recently into educating its members about cybersecurity risks, and how to prepare for them.
Patterson said it did not appear that the hacker, "Vanda the God" was targetting the IoD directly.

Instead, the Institute was hit in a global spray of attacks of global by the hacker, which also hit sites in the US, the UK and the Americas according to US media reports and a brag list on Vanda the God's Twitter account, which remains active.

The Institute has been told by one of its technology partners "that there is a small but highly unlikely chance a list of emails and potentially passwords may have been compromised," Patterson said.​

Hackers vandalized two of the state of Minnesota’s webpages last week, say IT officials — the second incident of government website defacement in Minnesota in two weeks.

For a brief time on Aug. 5, messaging that officials have described as “anti-government” covered a Minnesota Department of Human Services refugee services page and administrative portal, according to reports. Minnesota’s Security Operations Center quickly pulled them down and as of Friday was still investigating the incident.
The digital vandals infiltrate webpages, scrawl their names across them, and upload screenshots to online message boards, vying to get on the most impressive sites.

The incident comes after a similar attack on a Minnesota county website the week before.
On July 30, the homepage of Stearns County, a part of the larger Minneapolis metro area, displayed a photo of an individual with a Guy Fawkes mask and a sign advertising crudely for “the revolution,” according to local news outlets.

A global cyber security attack has forced the websites of four Wairarapa medical practices to be taken down after a Tu Ora Compass Health server fell victim to a hacker.
Tu Ora Compass Health’s website and the websites of Kuripuni, Greytown, Featherston, and Carterton medical centres cannot be accessed.

The affected websites were defaced on August 5 as part of a series of attacks across the world by a hacker group calling themselves ‘Vanda the God’.
The attack also hit sites in the United States, Great Britain and South America, according to a brag list on Vanda the God’s Twitter account.